The War of Liberation
The Coming Triumph of Marxist Socialism

I always regret when a serious discussion on principles and their application is mixed up with a charge of misrepresentation on either side. This gives a personal tone to the controversy, which is apt to confuse readers and may quite possibly irritate the disputants themselves. However, as the Editor has given me the fullest latitude to say what I please, in answer to his second article, I owe it to myself to state that, neither in the paper on “Socialism, Materialism, and the War,” which Bax and I contributed to the December number of the ENGLISH REVIEW, nor anywhere else, have I accepted, or defended, the “Revisionism” of Marx’s economic theories set forth by Eduard Bernstein some years ago.

So far from this being the case, I have invariably opposed and attacked Revisionism in all its forms. This is well known throughout the International Socialist movement. Moreover, in the very same article which Mr. Austin Harrison is criticising I say (p.56): “Revisionism most certainly will not arrest the approaching change. Its influence has been greatly exaggerated, as we could easily demonstrate. It is enough to say here that the leader of that clever but unsuccessful sect of mild progressives has himself not only abjured his errors, etc.” I am, therefore, not a little astonished when I find Mr. Austin Harrison speaking of Bernstein’s “jejune” Socialism as “defended by Mr. Hyndman,” and “my attitude” as “nothing more than an apologia for the failure of Revisionism.” He might with equal fitness write of Schopenhauer as the apologist and defender of Hegelianism.

For many years the New, like the Old, “International” has suffered from the dictation of the German Social Democrats and their special friends from Austria, Holland, and Scandinavia. Time after time they have postponed the holding of this or that international Socialist Congress because the date fixed by other nationalities did not suit their own domestic convenience. Nobody admired more than I the education, loyalty, self-sacrifice and discipline of the German Social Democrats in their national policy and tactics; no one has written and spoken in more laudatory terms of their party and their organisation as a whole; nevertheless, they and their friends carried things with such a high hand on the International Socialist Bureau, and treated the whole movement so much as if it were dependent on them, that on one occasion I suggested that nous autres pauvres apôtres of the rest of the civilised world should, for once, hold an independent Socialist Congress of our own. At another time really important affairs were neglected so completely, and so many hours were wasted on petty details of little real significance, that Keir Hardie and myself, who often differ, retired from the sitting, after frequently and vigorously protesting to no purpose against the restriction of discussion to business which had only interest for the German peoples. German predominance had even then – some years ago – become a nuisance and a danger. We kept silence, even from good words, in order to preserve the international unity of the party, and not to give an opening for ridicule to the enemy without; in order, also, to avoid weakening in any way the power of the German Social Democrats themselves in their bitter struggle against the enemy within.

Now these reasons for reticence no longer exist. The German Social Democratic Party has had the most glorious opportunity that ever fell to the lot of any people for putting Socialism and working-class international fraternity nobly before mankind. Millions of Socialists all over the civilised world looked to them for a lead. They were not asked to risk life or limb for the cause: they were not expected even to vote directly, as a party, against the credits demanded by their Government in order to pay for a war of aggression. We only hoped that they would abstain from giving by their vote the support of the German Social Democracy to the militarist caste which, holding Germany in its grip, had resolved to make war upon Europe; and we likewise expected that they would fully expound the reasons for their action. They themselves have abdicated the leadership which they had previously claimed.

So far, I am in agreement with Mr. Austin Harrison, and I doubt if he himself could put the case against the German Social-Democrats more strongly. But when he deals with the reasons for this distressing incident and assumes we are in despair because a fraction of a population of sixty-five millions of people failed to prevent the outbreak of the greatest war of all time, he grossly exaggerates the misfortune which has befallen our large and growing party. Moreover, he entirely misrepresents the causes of the fiasco. Thus, he tells us that, if the original ideas of Marx had held their ground, and the German Social Democrats had been guided by them, their party could have stopped the war. This I entirely deny. They had no power to do anything of the kind. If the whole of the hundred and eleven Social Democratic Deputies in the Reichstag had voted against the war credits this would not have checked the war for a day. Had they called upon Social Democrats to resist mobilisation by force, or to attempt a general strike, these efforts would have been alike costly and futile. A few noble spirits might have gone forward as martyrs in the cause. But these few would have been butchered mercilessly, under martial law, and the whole party crushed with relentless military severity.

Mr. Harrison, however, argues that the German Social Democrats had been misled by Revisionism, and that this was the cause of their weakness in the day of trial. There is no evidence of the truth of this contention. The Party in the Reichstag, and as represented by its Executive, was a Marxist party. True, these same Marxists had done some very foolish things. For example, they voted for the admission of the British Labour Party to the International Socialist Bureau and International Socialist Congress, though these British representatives pronounced against Socialism and had no definite programme either for political or social action. The chief German theorist, Karl Kautsky, even contended that the British Labourists though they were avowed anti-Socialists and refused to recognise the class war, must of necessity be revolutionists at heart without knowing it. Trade unions, however mild their methods or ineffective their tactics, could not, he argued, fail to fight the class fight, and should therefore be admitted without challenge to the same rights and privileges as ourselves. In vain did Madame Roussel, the Guesdist, point out that this was a return to the succession of weak and injurious compromises which had done so much harm at the earlier International Socialist Congresses, and was thus a reactionary rather than a progressive policy. Kautsky, and his majority, all of them placed two deaf ears at the service of the eminent Socialist Frenchwoman. So the facts went by the board and the philosophic illusionists had their will of us.

But all this precisely accorded with the “practical” policy of Karl Marx himself, in that early period of his propaganda which Mr. Harrison assures us contained the full flower of his “subversive” genius. In his Misère de la Philosophie (written in 1847 in opposition to Proudhon’s Philosophie de la Misère) Marx expressed the sanguine hope that the development of Trade Unionism, at the Trade Union Congress held in that year, betokened the commencement of an important revolutionary uprising in Great Britain. It was nothing of the kind. The great Chartist movement was even then approaching its final downfall. The abler leaders of that movement, and in particular Bronterre O’Brien, saw much more clearly than Marx what the growth of Trade Unionism meant at that juncture, and warned the people that the constitution of an “aristocracy of labour,” divorced from the main body of the proletariat, must inevitably act as a bulwark to capitalism, prevent the establishment of a really subversive proletarian organisation, and retard the emancipation of the wage-slave class. Even Marx’s residence in England, up to 1864, had not cured him of this delusion about the tendency of Trade Unionism at that time. So far as England was concerned, the old “International” was based upon Trade Unionism, not upon Revolutionary Socialism. The first meeting, held in London in 1864, at which the eminent Positivist, Professor Edward Spencer Beesly took the chair, was in the main a Trade Union gathering, and old members of that organisation still living will bear out the truth of what I say, even if the names and positions of the English members – Cremer, Bailey, Applegarth, and others – did not of themselves support my contention.

How right O’Brien was and how wrong Marx has long been clearly apparent. The Trade Unions have acted as a bulwark of capitalism. Their leading members in the House of Commons, by entering into close alliance with the Liberal Party, have headed back Revolutionary Socialism and helped to retard the emancipation of the entire wage-slave class for two full generations, as the Chartists predicted they would. A change is now taking place, but the more vigorous policy still makes way very slowly.

But all this, again, had nothing to do with Revisionism. The truth is that Marx who, in theory, was a thoroughgoing revolutionist, and, in practice, a revolutionist and supporter of revolution, wherever he could act in that capacity, comprehended more fully than many of his followers that the greatest social transformation of all time, from capitalist competition and production for profit to Socialist co-operation and production for use, must of necessity be a slow process. Therefore, in his anxiety to keep in touch with the organised forces of labour he ceased at times to be a theorist merely, and became in some degree an adherent of compromise. Even the famous Communist Manifesto (written with Engels) which gives, more succinctly than any other work, his survey of history, as a record of economic antagonisms and class wars, formulated in its early editions a series of palliative measures, leading, under capitalism, to a better state of things.

Mr. Harrison writes of Marx as a man whose teachings were of an anarchist and subversive character. Subversive, most certainly. Anarchist, not at all. It is impossible, argued Marx, to imagine that a society, based upon wage-slavery for the bulk of the population, can be developed into the new period without subversion. But he was none the less throughout his life engaged in continuous and bitter strife against anarchy and all that is anarchical. Individualist “propaganda of deed,” violent half-organised efforts to bring about a sudden change, attacks for attacking’s sake, nowhere found a more strenuous opponent than in the author of Das Kapital. Marx accused the Anarchists of dense ignorance of history and sociology, as well as of futile addiction to sentimental homicide. To him their theories were as fatuous as their practices were reactionary.

No one ever discriminated more clearly than Marx did between revolt and revolution. “No man, and no body of men, can make a revolution. No man, and no body of men, can crush a revolution when it is engendered in the womb of society.” At the time when Marx began to write, and for many a long year after, bourgeois ideas were universally dominant and the peace of the profit-monger prevailed in the land. Having obtained control of Western society by economic development, supported by their own organised force, the bourgeoisie were satisfied. Further use of force, being for them unnecessary, was not only improper but criminal. They had completely legalised the position of the capitalists and profit-makers; the aristocracy and the landowners were quite content to share their gains; while the wage-earners, the actual producers, were their nominally free but actually very obedient humble servants. Bourgeois property was secure, proletarian labour-power was cheap; people could say pretty much what they liked, so long as they contented themselves with only saying it. Most of them could even vote if they chose. All grounds for the use of force were therefore removed, from the bourgeois point of view. National uprisings against racial domination they might sympathise with – Mazzini, Kossuth, Garibaldi, Langiewicz were fine fellows: class uprisings against capitalist “organisation” were detestable and infamous – the physical force Chartists, Blanqui, Raspail, and Socialists of every hue, including Marx himself and his associates, were mere upsetters for destruction’s sake.

At such a period of plutocratic and pecuniary self-complacency it was natural that Marx should point out, and even dilate upon, the truths that force had been “the midwife of progress, delivering the old society pregnant with the new,” and that it was certain to be so again; that history did not end with the consolidation and legalisation of bourgeois supremacy; that, even under the forms of peace, force was constantly used by the capitalist class to repress unorganised revolt against what seemed to the people ordered injustice; and that the time would assuredly come when the disinherited majority would in turn strive for mastery, urged thereto by the hopelessness of securing their own well-being under the specious but oppressive forms of pecuniary domination. No intelligent man to-day will dispute that this is a sound view of the situation, or assert that capitalism spells the last word in the annals of the human race. But sixty, fifty, even forty years ago this was not so. The “intellectuals” were, for the greater part, incapable of understanding that the status of individualism which then pervaded the atmosphere of thought was, by existing economic conditions, rendered unattainable for the vast majority of mankind. Marx, therefore, was more than justified in systematising and giving a scientific sociologic basis to the teachings of the Chartists, and pointing out that force had still its revolutionary uses. Yet he knew better than they did that, though force would probably be attendant upon social revolution, it could not by any possibility produce a revolution by itself.

Good evidence of the value of Marx’s work is provided by Mr. Harrison himself; inasmuch that, although Marx has been dead more than thirty years, and his writings are not easy even for the educated minority to read or understand, Mr. Harrison is greatly concerned to prove to his own satisfaction that they are no longer of any serious importance. To repeat his own contention, the reason of this is that Revisionism has sapped the vitality of Marx’s revolutionary theories which I have just shown to be in no sense anarchistic. The ground for the confusion in Mr. Harrison’s criticism of Marxism is that he has assumed that Marx was throughout opposed to political action, and to sending members to the bourgeois national assemblies. This political action Mr. Harrison takes to be a special tenet of Revisionism. That is altogether opposed to the fact. Marx was from the first, and to the end of his life, strongly in favour of Socialists entering the political arena as Socialists.

In my own conversations with him, Marx was always clear on this point. He thought it probable that a powerful Socialist Party would eventually appear on the floor of the House of Commons – (which reads sadly to Socialists to-day) – and cited this as one of the reasons why “England is the one country where a peaceful revolution is possible – though history does not tell us so” The French Guesdists, the greatest sticklers in Europe for the pure faith of Marxism, have invariably used political methods wherever they have had the slightest chance of success, and even where they had not. The endeavour to capture the political machine by representation, or at least to hamper its smooth action in favour of capitalism, has been advocated persistently by the Marxists in every country, as the easiest and most effective way of making propaganda for their revolutionary principles. But Mr. Harrison goes farther in his strange misconception of the position, and takes for granted those very points of Revisionism which have just been explicitly renounced by its first propounder as wholly untenable. Marx contended that capital would accrete into larger and larger masses; that the wage-earning class would become more and more numerous in proportion to the possessing class; that the wage-earners would obtain a less and less share of the total national wealth in every country; and that discontent would become more and more widespread as the workers better understood the inevitable class war under capitalism, and comprehended the conditions under which they were toiling for the benefit of others. Bernstein, in his “Evolutionary Socialism,” disputed and denied all this. Upon this denial was based the programme of reform instead of revolution; of co-operation with liberal capitalism in place of relentless opposition to all political factions of the dominant class; of a general sober palliative movement, instead of a persistent active effort of the workers towards the great goal of Socialism.

These views spread to other countries, and hampered the Socialists much more there than in Germany itself. Bernstein was the founder and father of all this. He remained up to March last, in spite of discouragement, defeat, and personal detraction, its ablest and most persistent exponent. Then, as already said, he abjured his heresies completely. Not, as Mr. Harrison suggests, without a tittle of justification, because he foresaw the forthcoming war(!), but because twenty years’ experience of facts had irresistibly taught him that Marx was right and he wrong. Kautsky summed up the position thus: Bernstein acknowledges that all the important doctrines of Marxism are true: the Materialist Conception of History, the Theory of Surplus Value, the Concentration of Capitals, the Approaching Downfall of Capitalism, the Class War and its Increasing Bitterness.”

Here I leave the question of Revisionism finally. It has ceased to have any serious future interest for Marxists. Whether also Marx’s materialist theories have been absorbed by the militarists and turned by them to their own advantage in some extraordinary manner (counter to all that these theories connote) is not a matter of any moment to Socialists generally. I see no evidence whatever of this myself; but I am content to leave such a trifling point without discussing it. What I do see is that the vast development of anti-militarist Marxism throughout Germany, in the form of Social Democracy, was one of the main causes of the present war; for it engendered in the minds of the Junkers the fear that it would prove still more threatening in the near future. That Bebel supported the creation of a Democratic Citizen Army was no contravention at all of his Marxism. Far from it. It was, on the contrary, a reaffirmation of an important portion of the Marxist programme. At every International Socialist Congress, from 1900 onwards, Marxists, with Socialists of all shades of opinion, have voted unanimously in favour of the establishment of such a Citizen Army, with officers of proved capacity, elected by the rank and file, as the only effective means of upholding national independence against aggression from without and militarism within. I myself have advocated such a Citizen Army in Great Britain, first as Radical and then as Social Democrat, for more than forty years. And, oddly enough, I learnt to appreciate its value directly from one of Marx’s most vehement opponents – Giuseppe Mazzini. Would it indeed be a great drawback to British democracy if we had a genuinely well-trained and well-equipped National Citizen Army, under the control of the people, in this island to-day?

The old “International” came to an end in 1872, and was not revived in any definite shape until 1900; though a fissiparous attempt at reconstruction was made in 1889. After only fourteen, or, at the outside, twenty-five years of more or less solid and recognised existence as an international creed and party, we Socialists, without money, official power, or social position, are told that we have failed and that our Socialism has “collapsed” because we did not convince and dominate Europe and decree peace on earth and goodwill among men! Well, well; I am usually considered an optimist, but I confess to my shame, as an expert in making bonne mine au mauvais jeu, that I never at any period of my career as a Social Democratic educator and agitator took such an exalted view of our capacity.

Why, here is the Catholic Church alone, with 1850 years or so of tradition behind it; with millions of believers in every nation and on every continent; with an international organisation of unequalled strength; with tens of thousands of celibate priests and hundreds of thousands of fanatical devotees all over the world; and with vast resources at the disposal of an ecclesiastical autocrat who has the power to bind and loose for all eternity – here is this vast institution wholly unable to obtain a truce of God for Christmas, even with the support of other forms of its own creed! Yet we Socialists, whose international organisation (if organisation it could be called) really did collapse in 1872, and is anyhow but a child of yesterday, are blamed for not achieving, after half a century of tentative effort, what the followers of Christ have been wholly unable to accomplish by centuries of intellectual domination in Europe! Because the leaders of one great Socialist section have failed to act up to their principles, therefore all our economic analysis must be abandoned as illusory, all our historical investigations, which have cast light for the first time on many dark places in the record of humanity, must be thrown on the scrap-heap; and even all the facts which support and confirm our theories must, I suppose, be turned to a contrary purpose.

But Socialists do not for one moment accept any of these categorical imperatives. The views of Marx, far less modified by time than those of Darwin, will be upheld by nearly all the delegates at International Socialist Congresses after the war as they were before it. We have no need to search for a new system of political economy, to set on foot a fresh exposition of human history, nor to substitute a revised synthesis for that which we accepted prior to the outbreak of hostilities. The hopes rather than anticipations expressed at the great Socialist Peace Congress of Basle have not been realised. The protests which were there formulated under German leadership have evaporated in the heat of the unprecedented conflict provoked by German ambition. The spirit of militarist nationalism has, for the time being, obscured the ideal of International Socialism. This we admit. But so far is Socialism from having collapsed that already efforts – premature efforts though I hold them to be – are being made in every civilised country to renew our organisation when the war shall be past. Socialism is no more destroyed by the temporary recrudescence of national antagonisms than representative government was crushed when Cromwell decamped with the mace and locked the doors of the House of Commons, or when Napoleon the Great (or, for that matter, Napoleon the Little) proclaimed himself Emperor of the French. Those who imagine that the result of the present war will be to re-establish permanently the old national distrust and hatred, quite misread the signs of the times.

For the industrial evolution of humanity may be checked, but cannot be definitely arrested by the mutual slaughter of human beings. When the fighting ceases, progress goes forward from the point where peaceful development was interrupted. Nay, it is even possible that war may accelerate the rate of such progress. In Great Britain we daily perceive that (while still nominally maintaining the figment of free competition) the Class-State takes control of department after department, as in the case of the railways, uses the national credit to save monopolist banks from default, to maintain the honour of the great commercial houses, to guarantee financial issues in order to foster national industries, to regulate prices by enactment, to fling aside the doctrine of buying in the cheapest market, and to increase the State provision for soldiers and their dependants to an extent hitherto unheard-of and likely to be still further enlarged. True, most of these collectivist measures have so far been directed to the strengthening or buttressing the more powerful capitalist organisations. But will not the workers, whose combinations are simultaneously drawing closer and closer together, on a larger and larger scale, recognise that a State authority, which can thus be used in war to safeguard and benefit banks, financiers, merchants, and even branches of industry, in order to uphold the competitive system favoured by the master class, might be far better applied to inaugurate a system of national co-operation which would emancipate the working class? When £350,000,000 are raised almost without comment for the purposes of war, will it be possible for the most cheeseparing Chancellor of the Exchequer to ask effectively, “Where is the money to come from?” when the people call on him to expend a much larger sum for the higher purposes of peace? The questions answer themselves.

In France a similar development is proceeding, and what makes it more noteworthy is the fact that several members of the present French Ministry are ex-Socialists or Socialists, two of whom made very important stipulations before they took office. And what will happen in Belgium after the complete defeat and withdrawal of the Germans? Manifestly, only a national democratic administration, with that thorough-going Socialist, Emile Vandervelde, as a prominent Minister within, or more than a Minister without, supported by the great Socialist co-operative institutions, will be able to reorganise peacefully Belgian industry and transport. Even in Germany, after the downfall of militarist Junkerdom, where can we look for reconstructive forces outside the Social Democracy and the great trade unions able to dominate the vast trusts and combines on the one side, and to enlist the workers of the Fatherland in the vast enfranchised army of industry on the other?

That which Marx foresaw and predicted is being fulfilled and verified under our eyes. From small competitive production and petty pecuniary relations to the great factory industry, limited companies, vast exchange and transport, and divorce of workers from control over their own tools; from the great factory industry, with its increasing proletariat and enlarging area of distribution, to trusts, combines, monopolies, international capitalism, accompanied by the permanent wage-slavery of the mass of the population; from this period of capitalist monopoly, attended throughout by ever-growing combinations of the toilers, and constantly increasing recognition of the inevitable class war, to the introduction of State and municipal control, and extension of State and municipal employment under bureaucratic management, with wage-slavery still maintained, but class antagonism growing steadily more bitter and finding slowly political expression; from collectivist wagedom with mild political protest and unconscious revolt, to national and international co-operation and Social Democracy, by the conquest of political power and the transformation of competitive production for class profit to general co-operative production for Socialist and communal use.[1]

That this transcendent revolution shall be accomplished without passing through a period of internecine bloodshed and wholesale civil war, beside which even the present vast conflict will seem child’s play, calls for two conditions: A stage of human development in which the co-ordination of co-operative production on a large scale is possible; the education of competing wage-earners to the point where they can understand, and, having understood, can handle and control the economic and social growth going on around them of which they themselves form a part. It was Marx’s opinion that this must of necessity be a very slow process, even in the most advanced countries. His arguments compelled me many years ago to adopt his views.[2]

But since then events have occurred which lead me to take a more hopeful view of the rapidity with which we may attain our end. In particular, what has happened in Japan may well make us sanguine. Scarcely more than forty years have passed since Sir Rutherford Alcock referred to the Japanese as “highly intelligent children,” and spoke of their feudal system, their class gradations, consolidated by a fine religion, as likely to last for many a long day. Within that short term Japan has passed through an economic, social, and political evolution which Europe took four hundred years to accomplish.

Capitalism in Japan has now reached almost the same level that it has in Europe and America. The great factory industry is growing daily, State and municipal loans have been raised to an excessive amount, banks are becoming more and more powerful, great shipping lines are competing on equal terms with European ventures, even trusts and combines are beginning to develop. The hopes entertained by some of us that Japan, learning by the experience of Europe, would restrict and control the power of pecuniary domination have, unfortunately, proved false. But the protest of Socialism is being raised in earnest, in spite of the bitterest injustice and persecution, and there is no doubt that our opinions will steadily make way. In the much more difficult field of China, too, Socialism has its word to say. Is it not certain, therefore, that Socialism, even among the slow-moving populations of the East, will spread much more rapidly than seemed in the least likely even twenty years ago?

Every improvement in international communications and transport facilities cannot but tend to the expansion of international capitalism, both financial and industrial, with the simultaneous growth of trusts and monopolies, all over the world. But international capitalism is now everywhere being accompanied and attacked by international Socialism. This is more apparent by far to-day than it was yesterday, and the advance cannot fail to be still more marked to-morrow than it is to-day. For against the sinister international capitalist power in peace, as against the belated national antagonisms which lead to war, there is but one effective means of resistance: the solidarity of the workers of all countries, who have no interest either in the peaceful maintenance of capitalism, or in the forceful expansion of competitive industry and commerce. But such solidarity can only be achieved by thorough comprehension of the world-wide economic situation, and the acceptance of the ideals and religion of Socialism, which, beginning of necessity with national material issues, will gradually, for the first time in history, free all mankind for the highest tasks and the noblest emulation in every department of science, literature, and art. The school of Marx will take the lead in this high endeavour even more completely in the future than it has in the past. The reason for this is that Marxists alone possess the key to the complex historic, economic, and social evolution which leads to the new period. We do not claim any silly infallibility, or lay down a doctrinaire programme of inevitable development. Our work is to take account, consciously and capably, of the events which are occurring under our eyes; using and adapting the theories of a great genius to stages of human development the full details of which he claimed neither to foresee nor to predict.

Thus, then, when peace is proclaimed and the greatest International Socialist Congress the world has ever seen meets in the fine hall of the Maison du Peuple at Brussels, all the delegates present will feel that they and the millions of Socialists they represent are entering with greater certainty than ever upon the conquest of the future for the workers of the world. As we rise and take off our hats to the undaunted Belgians who, having sacrificed their all to save Europe from the barbarians, return, like the Athenians from Salamis, far stronger from the sea; as we record our admiration for the courageous minority of German Socialists who never despaired of the cause even in the darkest hour of militarist tyranny, we shall feel, every one of us, that our comrades have not suffered in vain. Thanks to their services, International Social Democracy will use the lessons taught by the horrors of war to secure for coming generations the permanent blessings of co-operation and peace.

1. The power of man over nature has increased and is increasing so rapidly that there is no difficulty whatever as to the creation of wealth. In fact, mankind in the highly-civilised countries is overmastered by its own machinery and capacity for production. Wealth may indeed be made as plentiful as water by co-operative effort. Only the fetishism of money bemuses the mind and prevents the workers from understanding the truth. In Western Europe the economic development has proceeded so far that only education is needed to enable the transformation to be made. Force cannot much longer be used as the abortionist of reaction.

2. Marx himself was inclined rather to extend than to reduce the period required to realise Socialism in any practical shape. I remember well that in one conversation with him at Maitland Park Crescent I expressed myself as being impatient at the intolerable delay which would occur before an effective change could be brought about in our horrible capitalist and wage-slave society. He replied: “When you have been impatient as many years as I have you will begin to be patient then.”